


Do You Like Lemonade?

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Conversations, Danny Pink - Freeform, Episode: s10e06 Extremis Fix-It, F/M, Friendship, Immortality, Plot Hole Filling, Some angst, Titan Comics Supremacy of the Cybermen fix-it, answers to longstanding questions, continuity fix-its, memory blocks, prequel to s09e12: Hell Bent, promises kept, spoilers for Doctor Who Series 9, surprise character references, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26272549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: The Doctor has blocked his memories of Clara Oswald. Now Clara has to take him home. But, before she can, she must make sure everyone who knew about her also has their memories blocked. Before finally taking the Doctor home, she must visit his oldest friend and dearest enemy. But will Missy agree?
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswald, Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	Do You Like Lemonade?

**Author's Note:**

> For the Doctor, this story is set after he passes out from using the neuro block, and before he wakes up in the desert in "Hell Bent", and for Clara it takes place after the Doctor passes out and before the Doctor arrives at the diner in "Hell Bent". For Missy, it takes place between "The Witch's Familiar" and the events leading up to the flashback in "Extremis" and her long incarceration in the Doctor's TARDIS. 
> 
> This story - my 70th work posted to AO3 - is intended to fill plot holes and act as a fix-it for the fact that, in a number of stories produced after "Hell Bent", the appearance is given that others had forgotten Clara, not just the Doctor. Specifically, I refer to Missy in "Extremis" (and throughout Series 10), and the Time Lord General and Ohila in the Titan Comics miniseries "Supremacy of the Cybermen", despite that story being explicitly a sequel to "Hell Bent" and yet no one mentions Clara. Why? This story attempts to provide a possible answer.

“For the record, I want you to know there are very few people in the universe I hate more than you. Just so we’re clear.”

“Lovely to see you too, dear. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Clara Oswald stood in the doorway of the musty London flat that Missy, who was until recently one of the two last known representatives of the species known as Time Lords, was temporarily calling home. 

Clara had no idea how Missy got to England in the early 1940s from Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks, where Doctor had stranded her. Frankly, she didn’t really care, other than it had taken a lot of effort to find her here. Missy escaping from the Daleks was hardly a universe-shattering concept. The Doctor could do it in his sleep. In fact, he literally did so at least once; Clara had seen it with her own eyes and gave him a good dressing down after when he finally woke up and wondered why her hair had suddenly got all messy. 

Ah yes, the Doctor. He was why Clara needed to see Missy. This was going to be an awkward conversation, and she had to get a few things off her chest first that were going to make it even more awkward. If all went well, she’d never have another opportunity. Best not to waste it.

Missy cleared her throat. “If I may interrupt what I’m sure must be a _scintillating_ internal monologue, clearly you have something to say to me, Clara. Come to apologize for leaving me behind on Skaro? Or have you finally decided to trade up in your choice of ‘travelling companions?’ My social calendar is depressingly empty these days.” Yes, she did the air quotes, which would have made Clara’s blood boil if she still had, well…

Clara crossed the threshold into the modest flat and looked around. Missy, stepping back from where she had opened the door, looked infuriatingly unchanged from the way she was when they last crossed paths. If not for known evidence to the contrary, she might have thought Time Lords never needed haircuts. Or a dry-cleaning service.

Missy picked up a teapot that occupied a spot on her coffee table and pointed the spout in Clara’s general direction, still awaiting a reply to her invitation. The young woman shook her head. With a sigh, Missy put down the teapot, cuddled in a Union Jack cosy, leaned back in a somewhat incongruous-looking armchair and sipped from her own cup. Clara still didn’t speak and silence like that always drove Missy crazy, so she broke it with some unnecessary exposition. 

“The family that lived here evacuated during the Blitz, apparently, so you could say I am minding the store. God knows where they found this chair. It’s not the Waldorf Astoria, but it’ll do until I fix my vortex manipulator. Don’t ask how it got broken, it’s embarrassing. Okay, I sat on it. You wouldn’t happen to still have yours? I’ll swap-”

“Do you know what happened to the Doctor?” Clara finally broke in, her voice cold as ice. That was enough to make Missy forget about bantering for now.

“Given _his_ lifestyle, you could be referring to a million things. I plead not guilty to all of them, Your Honour.”

“I never said you had anything to do with it. Your people did. I want to know what you know because you were the one entrusted with his confession dial before he got it back from you.”

Missy shifted her eyes slightly, enough for Clara to know she hit a bit of a raw nerve.

“That narrows things down a bit, I guess. Well, I know Gallifrey is back, somewhere, somewhen. I felt them, for lack of a better word,” Missy said. “Was quite distracting when I was trying to give the Daleks the slip. _His_ doing, I suppose?”

“ _Our_ doing,” Clara shot back. “Well, sort of our doing. Not really intentional, more of an accident.”

Reaching under a scuffed-up pillow that supported her lumbar region, Missy pulled out a tablet computer that looked totally out of place for 1942. For a moment, Clara thought she was being ignored, but then, after swiping at the screen a few times, Missy turned it in her direction.

A news website headline: “Schoolteacher found dead; cause unknown.”

“Speaking of accidents, care to explain?” Missy asked, silkily. “Or should I take it that this is what people in your near future would call ‘fake news?’”

Clara had tried to avoid looking at any news coverage about what happened on Trap Street. It was bad enough that she was forever one heartbeat away from death, at least until a time of her choosing, but knowing she could never see her family or friends again—not to mention her current mission—she didn’t need the likes of the _Daily Mail_ reminding her that her life was now changed forever. No going back. 

Missy prodded: “Not the most flattering of photos. And don’t play dumb with me. This is from your very recent past, not your future.” She made a ridiculous and useless gesture of sniffing the tablet, as if gauging its bouquet. “A few days, tops.”

“I died five days ago. From my perspective, anyway.”

Missy chuckled. “Leave it to a human to muck up such a simple thing as death. Trust someone who has seen and caused more death than you’ve had collapsed soufflés: when you die, you either become dust or you regenerate. And much as you come off as a Doctor tryhard, regeneration isn’t something they teach at public school. I’ve been trying to figure out how you faked it. They even found a body. Apparently, all of its internal-”

“Shut up.” Clara stalked towards Missy’s chair and stuck out her right arm, interrupting her. Missy took a firm grip of her hand. “I’m not offering you a handshake, you idiot. Take my pulse.”

Missy stifled the urge to throttle the human and shifted her grip to Clara’s wrist. Her smile became a frown. She tried again with the other wrist. Then she stood up and gestured towards Clara’s chest. “May I? Nothing improper intended, I assure you. You’re not really my type.”

On Clara’s nod, Missy placed the back of her hand above where Clara’s heart should have been beating. In such close quarters, Missy also noticed for the first time that the supposedly natural flesh tone Clara sported was actually make-up, and the red lipstick she wore did not completely mask the bluish tone of her lips underneath. She squeezed Clara’s nostrils shut with one hand and covered her mouth with the other; Clara, knowing where this was leading, didn’t protest.

Missy didn’t need to block Clara’s breathing for very long before she knew for certain that there was no breathing to block.

“He turned you into a _zombie_?” It had been a long time since something legitimately angered Missy. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to work out. 

Clara pulled away. “No, he saved me. And it cost him more to do that than you could possibly imagine. So you’re now going to sit back down in that chair and listen while I tell you some things as you’re clearly out of the loop, for once.”

And then, pacing as she did so, Clara spoke to the Doctor’s oldest friend and dearest enemy. She spoke of the raven used by the Quantum Shade as a cruel method of execution; of the moment of weakness and overconfidence that cost her her life during what otherwise would barely rate a comic strip at the back of an _Evening Standard_ annual, if they were to ever make one about the Doctor’s adventures; of the Doctor being trapped in his confession dial for at least four and a half billion years in order to protect the secret of the Hybrid, or so he let the Time Lords think, anyw-. 

“-Wait—four and a half _billion_ years?” Missy interrupted.

“Yes. Maybe even longer than that. When he finally broke himself out of the confession dial—and you really don’t want to know what he went through in order to do that—he found himself back on Gallifrey. But he wasn’t the same man he was when he went into the dial ... after I … died.”

Missy scoffed. “The Doctor is _always_ the same bloody man. That’s what drives me crazy. Do you mean he regenerated? Shame, the middle-aged punk rocker look was just starting to win me over.”

Clara glared at her. “Did _you_ ever spend billions of years punching through a diamond wall with your bare fists? Then shut the hell up and stop making jokes. Keep listening.”

Clara spoke of the Doctor deposing no less than Lord President Rassilon himself and taking over the government of Gallifrey, all so he could use an extraction chamber to take her out of time a split-second before the Quantum Shade struck her down on Trap Street.

Missy interrupted Clara’s narrative again. “He had no right to do that. He could have destroyed everything: past, present and future. The cosmos without _I’m a Celebrity_ scarcely bears thinking about.”

“Missy, he didn’t care at that point. Four and a half billion or whatever many years in a personal hell—do you really think he cared?”

“But why you? No offence, but you’re not the only companion who the Doctor has had to watch die. Take his wife, for example … the one with the eighties hair. Or dear Adric, left behind on a Cybermen ship to die.”

“You’re too good a matchmaker, Missy,” Clara cut in. “You ‘gave me to him,’ remember? You said so yourself back in that cemetery. You said you did that so I would drive him crazy, right? Well, I guess I did my job, because somewhere along the way he fell in love with me.”

“Sentimental garbage. Time Lords are above such things.”

“You just mentioned his wife. Didn’t you get the wedding invite? And last I recall, marrying River was far from his first rodeo in that department. We won’t count Marilyn Monroe; that wasn’t even a real chapel. But you know what I mean.”

“River Song was the result of post-regeneration psychosis. The one with the bow tie never really got over it. That’s why I avoided him until Mr. Holey Jumper came along.”

“Sure, Missy. You were jealous, admit it. Just as you were jealous of what the Doctor and I have … what we had. The Doctor fell in love with me, because you matched us too perfectly. And you once told me I could never know the Doctor as well as you. That might be true, but I do pay attention. Enough to know that, when the Doctor is in love with someone, it can be dangerous. He destroyed a sun once simply to say goodbye to Rose Tyler. And a while ago I found out he actually would have allowed time to break in order to prevent River from going to her death because he expected to die on Trenzalore with no more regenerations available and he hadn’t taken her to Darillium yet to say goodbye. I gave him hell for that. Irony of ironies.”

“Temporal semantics,” Missy mumbled, then, almost as if she were talking to someone else. “Don’t try to figure it out, it’ll give you an embolism.”

“You do know that if I hadn’t talked the Time Lords into granting him more regenerations on Trenzalore, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

Missy laughed loudly at this: “Becoming a _Walking Dead_ extra has given you delusions of grandeur, my dear. Do you _really think_ the High Council gave a damn about anything you had to say? They had their own reasons for granting him more lives. Finding out about the Hybrid, for example; did you ever think about that? Or maybe they knew he had that bit of unfinished business with the missus. You just told me about the royal fit they had with you being taken out of time. Rassilon bred altruism out of the High Council aeons ago.”

Clara had to concede the point. “You know what, Missy? I believe you. After having now finally met some of the people in charge on Gallifrey, I actually believe you. I don’t take back the part about you being jealous or the Doctor in love being dangerous, though.” 

Missy leaned forward. “So why are you telling me all this? Cut to the spoilers. Where is the Doctor, anyway?”

“We stole a TARDIS from Gallifrey and ran away together.”

“How romantic. I may cry.”

“It didn’t last long. And now I’m … sort of on my own.”

“You didn’t do something stupid like get married to the some random alien, did you? I was worried you were going to get hitched to that Oatmeal chap and screw everything up.”

“His name was Porridge. And I still owe you a conversation about all that spying on us.”

Missy took a sip of her tea. “Why? It was the best TV show I’d seen in years. I particularly liked the episode about the Crimson Horror. You deserved a BAFTA. Especially that bit where you booped the Doctor’s nose. My hearts were all a-flutter.”

“My life is not a TV show, Missy. Nor is his.”

Another sip of tea. “You just keep telling yourself that, dear. I have never encountered anyone as melodramatic as you. Your middle name should be Angst.”

Clara found herself smiling at that. _Oh, you don’t know the half of it_ , she thought, then said, “Cutting a long-”

“ _-very long-_ ”

“-story short, the Doctor thought getting me out of Gallifrey’s time zone would make my heart start beating again.”

Missy frowned. “Even by his standards, that makes no sense.”

“Still, I hoped he was right. But it wasn’t meant to be. He kept taking us forward in time, further into the future, until, well, we ran out of future. And my heart refused to start beating again. So to give you the edited version as there are parts of this that are none of your damn business, we used this.”

Clara took a small device roughly the size of a television remote control out of a jacket pocket. 

Missy recognized it. “A neural blocker. I’ve used them from time to time. Sometimes fatally. You have to be careful or you can block memories about how to breathe or regenerate.” She reached out for it. “Let Mummy take care of that toy before you hurt yourself.”

Clara looked down at it instead. “The Doctor was going to erase my memory with it, all the things we did. I said no. Instead, he used it to block his own. At least, the parts that had to do with me.”

Missy was silent for a moment. “Why?”

“I don’t know if you deserve to know why.”

“Feel free to not believe me, but I am sorry. Both for your death and what happened to him.”

“You’re full of garbage, Missy. If you’d had your way, he’d have killed me back on Skaro when you nearly tricked me into saying ‘I love you’ to him while I was in the Dalek. He would have heard ‘Exterminate’ and blown me away. Can you imagine, after all I just told you, that once he realized he’d killed me he’d have shrugged it off getting drunk at the pub? You, Skaro and half the universe would have burned.”

Missy nearly smirked, but there was something dangerous in Clara’s eyes she’d never seen before. 

“I think I realize why the Doctor did it. Erased your memory,” Missy said instead. “As long as he knew about you, he would never have let you go. He would have kept trying to bring you back to life, to keep you away from wherever that was you said made you bite the biscuit. He had to forget you. How close am I?”

Clara shrugged. “Not one hundred per cent but, as guesses go, that was a pretty good one.”

“Where is he now?”

“Sedated in m-his TARDIS,” Clara lied. Missy was still stuck with using a vortex manipulator to get around time and space; no need her knowing about the second TARDIS. She enjoyed classic Frank Sinatra, but not enough to find herself living through his career in real time. “The effects of the neural block knocked him cold. We’ve kept him that way so we can do some work.”

“Hmmm… who is ‘We?’ Cheating on the old boy already?” Now Missy felt safe to smirk.

“Ashildr. She’s sort of a friend, even though she’s the reason why I’m dead. Long story. It was Ashildr who realized the Doctor erasing only his memory wouldn’t be good enough. I’ve been a part of the Doctor’s life for a long time, and there are many others who could remind him of me. Show him a photo. Ask what happened to me. Give condolences if they saw that.” (She pointed at the tablet, which still displayed the news story.) “The UNIT Christmas parties would be a minefield. So we put the Doctor into something called the Zero Room in the TARDIS and started tracking down nearly everyone the two of us met.”

Clara took a deep breath. Or, at least, tried to. There was an awkward pause as she tried to gracefully cancel the reflex action. She obviously didn’t need more air for her monologue, but…

“Old habits die hard,” Missy said, not unsympathically. “You’ll make a fortune in professional static apnea competitions. They become all the rage in the 2030s; easy to social distance when you’re just holding your breath.”

“Social distance?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“I’ve told this story more times than I care to count, though you’re getting the extended dance mix,” Clara said. “And it always ends the same way, with me saying that as long as anyone remembers me, the Doctor will never give up looking for me if he is ever reminded that I existed. But you beat me to it. So that brings me back to this damned thing.” She held out the neural blocker again.

Missy looked at it with disgust; the penny had dropped some time earlier. “Suppose if I refuse? I put a lot of work into you, you know. You’re my masterpiece. And now you could live forever, even better. I don’t plan to die, either.”

“You’re not the first one to ask me to make an exception, Missy. No one can remember me. At least no one the Doctor is likely to encounter again; it didn’t feel ethical to do it to my students and Mr. Armitage was too quick on the ball and had a memorial plaque in my name installed within a couple of days, so I’m rolling the dice there. I doubt the Doctor will have a reason to set foot in Coal Hill School again, anyway. But we both know you’re bound to run across him, like a bad penny. And I don’t trust you to keep your mouth shut when you do.”

Missy contemplated. “You realize this exercise is pointless so long as the Time Lords still remember you.” 

“I admit it took some doing to convince Ohila of the Sisterhood of Karn and the High Council’s general, whose name I never did catch, to go through with it. But I convinced them, even though it took Ashildr holding a gun on them to get them to listen to me and not frog-march me into the extraction chamber the moment I arrived.”

Missy smiled broadly. “See, you are good! What did you do, seduce them? Teach them to play poker like you did what’s-er-name, the writer?”

“No, I promised them I would return, someday, to the extraction chamber. As long as I do that, history will continue on its merry way. It also helped that Ohila broke about a dozen Time Lord laws and looked ahead into my future and saw that I still have things to do before I face the raven. So there’s that, I guess. And apparently they actually needed the Doctor back on Gallifrey to help with something involving Rassilon and the general admitted it was going to make things less complicated not to have me in the picture. That’s all I know.”

“If they don’t remember you, you don’t need to make good on that promise.”

Clara smirked. “And that’s why it’s a good thing I’m not you, then, isn’t it. I might be the universe’s most accomplished and, of late, most immortal liar, but I keep my promises.”

“Blah, blah. So what will you do after your little cleanup operation?” Missy said as she gestured at the neural blocker.

“One thing for sure, there will be none of that ‘Oncoming Storm’ business. That’s not me. I’ve pretended to be the Doctor a few times, but I have no plans of actually becoming him; the pay isn’t that great and the benefits suck. And before you reach for that gun under the table, it won’t do you any good, so don’t waste your time.”

Missy froze in place, disappointed that her subtle movement toward the firearm wasn’t as subtle as she had hoped.

Clara continued: “One of the first people I visited was a guy named Jack Harkness. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure. Sort of an expert in the immortality business. One of his colleagues spent his last few months as a living corpse, too, so he knows all the ins and outs. Amazing singing voice, too. We did some tests before Jack let me block his memories and, trust me, he tried _very_ hard to persuade me to change my mind. Long story short, I can’t die unless it’s the Quantum Shade raven making a beeline for my chest on Trap Street in the late 2010s.”

“Sure I can’t give it the old college try, just for fun?” Missy said as she fully pulled back from the weapon. 

“Look down at your chest.”

“Yes, impressive aren’t-”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Let me guess,” Missy said, without actually looking down. “There’s a laser sniper scope pointed at one of my hearts. I saw the reflection in the window ages ago, I’m not blind. The Time Lords gave me a new set of regenerations during the Time War and I’m still early on in the count. Even back in Spain, you knew better than to have just one gun trained on me. Did you learn nothing about my lesson about the stick?”

“True, it probably won’t kill you. But, having been grazed once or twice back when I could actually feel pain, I can imagine being shot square in the chest really hurts like hell, and, by the time the next one wakes up, Ashildr and I will have them bound, gagged, and imprisoned in the TARDIS.”

“Ooh, I’ll provide the handcuffs!” Missy said. Clara just stared back. “Nothing? Tough crowd. Did you leave your sense of humour behind with your heartbeat?”

“You think I find this funny, Missy? Seriously, would you really want to take my place? At least you’ll still be able to see him again and if you do die, you’ll get another do-over. I’m not doing this for bloody kicks. And there’s no do-over for me.”

Missy smiled. “Now that you have expelled some more angst, you still haven’t really explained to me all of the reasons why I need to forget you.” A statement, not a question.

“Because you owe me.”

“Owe you?”

“Yeah. How many years did you spy on me and the Doctor? Were you spying on Danny and me all that time, too? I know you saw and heard things you were private, things only the Doctor or Danny and I shared. So I want you to answer me this one question, yes or no. And remember what I said about being a liar; I can spot one a mile away. Tell a lie and I will know and I’ll signal Ashildr to shoot. I know you would never take a regeneration for granted, especially since you also should rightly have died centuries ago under your people’s own rules. Do you agree to answer my question?”

“I’ll try not to use Wikipedia.”

Clara set her gaze solidly on Missy. “Did you kill Danny Pink?”

Missy stayed silent.

“I just have to give a signal. I was willing to do it back in Spain, and I’m just as willing now. Just a simple binary answer: yes or no. There is no third option here.”

Missy forced the answer out. “Yes.”

Clara no longer had most of the natural bodily functions of her mortal life. Oddly, she could still cry for some reason (Time being a cruel bastard, most likely), but everything else was suspended. But her emotions—well, those were as vivid as ever. And, for a moment, Clara’s anger boiled. It was enough to make Missy stand up and step behind her chair, offering its back as a waist-high shield; totally useless, given the laser beam from the distant scope remained trained on her chest. 

“Do you want an apology? Or an excuse?” Missy said quietly, immediately regretting the choice of words. Now was not the time for flippancy. In her mental stormroom, she heard her next incarnation rapping on the door.

But no explosion of violence came. No lashing out. No prearranged signal that would send a bullet into her from afar. Clara’s hands, which had been tightly squeezed into fists, relaxed.

In fact, Clara chuckled. “You know, if I was the same person I was back in that graveyard where Danny launched himself into the sky, the one who had you dead to rights, I’d have not only had Ashildr shoot you right now, but I’d have had her keep going until you ran out of lives. She actually wants to do that, by the way. You’re still pretty new to me, but she’s been following your exploits for millennia.”

“And yet she’s never so much as given a like to any of my Tumblr posts. I’m heartbroken.”

“I saw the Doctor at his worst, Missy. His most cold-hearted. Sometimes nearly as bad as you. Some of that rubbed off on me, I won’t lie. There are things I’ve done even he doesn’t know about and never will. But I saw that man forgive a person who was responsible for hundreds if not thousands of deaths during the Zygon uprising. If he could forgive her, and even Davros, who was far worse … then I forgive you. I think Danny would want that, too. And so would the Doctor. Who knows, he might do the same someday.”

Missy said nothing. Because, for the first time in a long while, she was left without words.

Clara handed the neural blocker to her. “Push the button. It’s been recalibrated for Time Lords. You’ll black out for a few minutes and it’ll truly be like I was never here when you wake up. Or don’t. Stomp it to pieces. Your choice.”

Missy examined the device. Then she said: “Will you accept some unsolicited advice? There is no way the Doctor can have forgotten you completely; this is a neural block, after all, not a neural _erase_ , though was designed to be virtually impossible to undo. I know of very few entities capable of undoing it, most of whom are non-corporeal, and one reason why this is so dangerous is the Time Lords intentionally never developed a way to undo the process. It’s intended to be a one-way street.”

Missy took a breath, and continued. “The Doctor and his companion, it doesn’t matter if you’re little more than bezzie mates or shagging up a storm in the school maintenance closet during the morning break, your lives are different than anyone else’s. The experiences you and the Doctor shared—that mummy on the Orient Express in Space, an Ice Warrior on a submarine, the Black Archive, up to your death and what happened on Gallifrey after. Add to that his irrational crush on you that got worse the greyer he got… these are Clara-shaped holes the Doctor is always going to try to fill, consciously or otherwise. And when he remembers, it could be very dangerous for everyone. Unless you’re planning to keep him confined in his TARDIS indefinitely, of course. Remember, I have a set of handcuffs I can lend you.”

“You’re the last loose end. Then we’re going to return him to London.”

Missy sat back down in her chair. “And then what? I bet you within minutes he’ll be trying to find out who the big-eyed cuddlebug was who keeps flitting through his dreams. I bet you a cup of tea that, regardless how careful you are, he’ll find your name before his next supper. And he won’t stop until he’s found you again. You need to do something to set his mind at ease that this memory wipe was the right thing to do. That it had to be done. And that he has to let you go. Just as you’ll have to let go of him. You have to somehow let him know you’ll be OK. That’s the key. And then … goodbye.”

Clara thought about this as she gazed out the window on the bomb-damaged street below. Indeed, the Doctor, despite being sedated, had been talking in his sleep, as if he was telling a story. And he had said things about the Cloisters, the TARDIS workshops, Ohila, Rassilon and, yes, he had said her name, too. And Missy was also right that letting go of the Doctor was going to be the toughest thing of all. _The Doctor told me to do what has to be done_ , she thought.

“Perhaps you’re right, Mis-” The neural blocker clattered to the floor as Missy slumped in her chair. 

Clara somberly picked up the device. A communicator adhered close to her left ear chirped.

“Did you finally manage to bore someone to death?” Ashildr said from her sniper perch across the street. “Personal best.”

“Don’t you start.”

“I guess all that’s left is to take the Doctor home. I’ll meet you at the TARDIS.”

Clara took a moment to gently adjust Missy’s unconscious form; she didn’t want her sliding off the chair and waking up with a cramp, after all.

***

A few minutes later, Clara was inside the Zero Room of her TARDIS, her cool hand on the Doctor’s forehead as he floated in midair. His eyes moved rapidly under the lids, but he seemed more peaceful than he had been when he was shifting restlessly a few moments before.

 _I wonder if he ever dreams of me?_ Clara thought. _And herein, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, lies the problem_. 

And then she thought, _Missy was right. It’s going to be hard to let you go, Doctor. Let me be brave._

Ashildr came into the room, holding a long tube with a button at one end and an outlet for a laser beam on the other. “You should have let me use an actual rifle rather than just shining this thing at her, Clara. What if she’d called your bluff?”

“She probably knew it was fake anyway. Ohila probably knew your gun was fake, too.”

Ashildr stood next to Clara and felt the Doctor’s forehead. “We can’t keep him unconscious for much longer. Time to take him home.”

“We’re not done yet, Ashildr.”

“For the millionth time, I’m _Me_ now, not Ashildr.”

Clara was still looking down on the Doctor. “It’s either that or Fred.”

“Fred?”

“In-joke. Never mind. Missy said we need to keep some memories of me alive in him after all.”

“Since when have you ever believed anything that … person says?”

“Since I agreed with her. We’ve been going about this wrong.”

Ashildr cocked an eyebrow. “Wrong? I’m sorry, should I set the co-ordinates to go back to Osgood, Bonnie, Kate Stewart, your doppelganger in Antarctica and all the others we visited? Maybe if we bash it about a bit, the neural block will trigger an ‘undo’ setting.”

“Ashildr, don’t try to outsnark the Doctor. That’s a battle you can’t win,” Clara said, patiently. “Did you ever watch _Star Trek: The Next Generation_?”

“Does dating Patrick Stewart when he was a teenager count?”

“Moving on, there was an episode where the crew of the _Enterprise_ had to blank their memories of an encounter with some very insular aliens. But they didn’t do a thorough enough job and left behind enough breadcrumbs to create a mystery and, as they worked to solve it, everything was undone and they nearly got killed. Following me so far?”

“Go on.”

The Doctor stirred. Although it was impossible for him to wake up voluntarily while in this condition, Clara and Ashildr took that as their cue to exit the Zero Room and leave him in peace. In the ivory-coloured, roundel-lined corridor outside, Clara continued.

“I’m saying we give the Doctor some breadcrumbs of our choosing, rather than risk him finding them on his own. Obviously, we can’t undo everything we’ve done, even if that was possible. But we can leave some clues here and there. A trail.”

“Leading where?” Ashildr asked in the tone of voice a person uses when they already know the answer.

“To me.”

They returned to the gleaming console room; so different from the library-like surroundings of the Doctor’s TARDIS that Clara loved.

Ashildr frowned. “Forgive me. Maybe all those centuries playing chess by myself at the end of time has left me a bit rusty when it comes to interpersonal relationships, but that still sounds to me like it’s undoing everything _we’ve just bloody done!_ ”

“No, it’s simple. We take the Doctor back home, but we don’t leave the TARDIS with him.”

“Go on.”

“We take the TARDIS away. Give him a challenge to distract him at first—like, we drop him off somewhere random, not London. That will keep him busy. Then, when he eventually gets back to London, we send him a message with co-ordinates for, I don’t know, another random place on Earth. ‘You’ll find what you seek there.’ Something like that. He won’t be able to resist, trust me.”

“And then what?”

“I guess we play it by ear. We need to somehow make him realize I am okay, but he doesn’t need to search for me. He can move on. Otherwise, he can’t and that’s what Missy was worried about.”

Ashildr frowned. “And how will we do all this?”

Clara smiled in a way that made her look happy and sad at the same time.

“Do you like lemonade?”

**Author's Note:**

> Concordance of possibly esoteric references. This story includes references to multiple Series 7, 8 and 9 episodes but I'll assume the reader will recognize those...
> 
> As far as I am aware, Clara never gave back the vortex manipulator she wore in "The Magician's Apprentice." Even if she did, we never saw her give back the one she got in "The Day of the Doctor"...
> 
> The concept of "feeling" the presence of other Time Lords was touched upon numerous times in the series, including "The Doctor's Wife".
> 
> "The cosmos without..." gag references something the Master says in "The Five Doctors". Past Masters (Delgado, Simm) expressed an interest in modern pop culture, so Missy invoking a reality show fits.
> 
> "Mr. Holey Jumper" refers to a shirt Peter Capaldi himself owned and wore in a number of episodes.
> 
> Clara never gave the Doctor "hell" for risking reality by not taking River to Darillium on screen, but she has done so in a couple of my fanfics. The concept that the Time Lords were going to give the Doctor new regenerations in "Time of the Doctor" anyway is an idea I had based on the fact they were so interested in finding out the identify of the Hybrid.
> 
> The Zero Room is a recuperation facility located within TARDISes first seen when the Fifth Doctor needed to recover from his regeneration in "Castrovalva." It was later destroyed in his TARDIS, but presumably one still exists in Clara's. As "Hell Bent" established that she had a manual, and that Ashildr was able to read it, it is assumed that the two worked out things such as the Zero Room, how to materialize safely around another TARDIS, etc.
> 
> The memorial plaque at Coal Hill School refers to the first episode of the spin-off, "Class". 
> 
> The General refers to the (upcoming) events of the Titan Comics miniseries "Supremacy of the Cybermen" which, despite being a direct sequel to "Hell Bent", had no one mention Clara, even as the Doctor returned to Gallifrey to deal with Rassilon.
> 
> "What's-er-name the writer" is Jane Austen; Sarah Pollard has said the teaser of an early draft of her script, "Face the Raven", had Clara teaching Jane how to play cards.
> 
> Jack Harkness needs no introduction; Clara also refers to the fate of Owen Harper in Series 2 of "Torchwood." The idea of Clara being unkillable in her present state is assumption based on Time requiring her to die on Trap Street at a specific time, so presumably that makes her indestructible like Captain Jack in the meantime.
> 
> I'm far from the only one who believes Missy was responsible for Danny's death. Things were too convenient otherwise and Missy wanted Twelve and Clara together and Danny complicated the narrative.
> 
> For more about the Fred joke, see "The Ribos Operation" when the Fourth Doctor meets Romana (a.k.a. the Lady Romanadvoratrelundar) for the first time.
> 
> For more about Clara vs. holographic tigers, see the made-for-DVD minisode "Clara and the TARDIS" and my own followup story, "Clara and the TARDIS: Seven Nights Later". The reference to the TARDIS keeping the police box form by choice is from deleted scenes from Neil Gaiman's "The Doctor's Wife".
> 
> Clara's Antarctica doppelganger is Winnie Clarence, a Clara "echo" in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story "Blood and Ice". 
> 
> The TNG episode I refer to (and which partly inspired this story) is "Clues."


End file.
